A proper stance is the first thing you will learn when training Muay Thai.
It is the foundation of all Muay Thai techniques. And when we say fight stance, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re gonna fight someone.
We use the term ‘fight stance’ as a verbal cue to initiate a certain posture and body position.
Without a proper stance, you will have a sloppy offense and poor defense.
Let’s start with some basic vocabulary.
The way you stand will be dependent on what hand you are dominant with- Meaning:
What hand do you write with?
If you are a right-handed person, which basically, is most of the population; You are what is called “Orthodox”.
If you are left-handed, you are a ‘South Paw’.
A right-handed, or “Orthodox” stance means you lead with the left side of your body.
Left hand/arm, hip and left leg lead, and the right side, right arm, right leg is to your rear in a staggered, almost perpendicular position.
A left-handed, or “South Paw” stance means you lead with the right side of your body.
Right hand/arm, hip and right leg lead, and the left side, left arm, left leg is to your rear in a staggered, almost perpendicular position.
In both these stances, your shoulder and hip line is almost squared to the target.
Question: Why tuck away the dominant hand? Shouldn’t it lead?!?
Answer: The idea behind your stance is to have your ‘power’ or ‘stronger’ hand to your rear and your ‘less-trained’ hand leading.
Typically, the lead hand is used to set up the power hand. We try to train the lead hand much more than the rear hand for it to become a strong weapon that will aide in landing the rear or ‘power’ hand.
Or at least that’s how the generally fight philosophy goes.
Likewise, the rear kick will be the stronger kick if we follow the same logic.
A fight stance also has two different ‘modes’. One is an ‘idle’ fight stance where we are not engaged in combat, and just ’waiting’ for something to happen, and the second mode would be engaged, where we are either
A). Attacking.
or
B). Defending.
In a fight, these are the two scenarios we typically find ourselves in.
For the sake of simplicity and learning, we are mainly going to focus with a very basic fight stance.
The fight stance itself is very nuanced with a lot of things to consider such as, elbow, forearm, shoulder and hand position but we are mainly going to deal with a panoramic view of the technique.
In summary, fight stance is:
1. Hands up
2. Chin down
3. Legs should width apart
1. Hands up: Imagine looking through binoculars. We do this to protect the head from strikes.
What kind of strikes? Basically all of them.
What kind of defensive techniques are available? MANY. Different video for that topic though.
2. Chin down: Knockouts happen when the jaw and chin is rattled. Must protect at all cost. This is key.
3. Legs shoulder width apart: This the optimal width for your legs to be in order for you to have proper balance and weight distribution that will maximize your ability to be agile.
This is important because agility is an important competent to defense and offense.
You should never be tense or stiff. Doing so will cause you to exert valuable energy that can be better used for offense or defense.
A good fight stance is loose and relaxed.
It may seem paradoxical to say that your arms should be pinned to your body and tight to your head, but when we say that we don’t actually mean for you to force your appendages to the torso or head.
What we are trying to have the athlete do is minimize the amount of space available between the limbs and the most common targets being the head, and the body.
Space means opportunity for your opponent.
And it in that, we have the basic ‘Muay Thai Fight Stance’.